Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa
Writer: David Hemingson
Runtime: 133 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a history teacher at the prestigious boarding school Barton Academy, finds himself tasked with babysitting five students during the Christmas vacation. “I’m being punished,” Hunham says when asked how he ended up being the one who drew the short straw, and he’s right. Hunham, mocked by other teachers for his lazy eye and idiosyncratic ways, lives on campus and it is well known that his life revolves around the school. This could be a good thing, but Hunham has gone and irritated the principal by failing a student with a powerful father. Consequently, he gets stuck with the “holdovers” — students who remain in school instead of going home to their parents to celebrate Christmas with family.
Initially, The Holdovers seems like director Alexander Payne’s take on Dead Poets Society (1995), replacing the inspiring effervescence of Robin Williams’ John Keating with the dour grumpiness of Hunham, who doles out some fabulous insults like “you hormonal vulgarian” (this is to a student) and “I have known you since you were a boy, so I think I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form” (this is to the current principal of Barton Academy). However, the similarity is superficial and there’s no “Captain o my captain” moment here. Instead, The Holdovers is more like a modern A Christmas Carol, replacing Charles Dickens’s London with the wintry emptiness of New England in the Seventies. The film ultimately settles into a gentle exploration of class, privilege and prejudice, but wrapped in a story about three lonely misfits unexpectedly finding comfort at a time of despairing sadness.
The tone of The Holdovers changes when four of the students are able to leave and Hunham is left with only one ward: The angsty Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), whose mother has gone awol after apologising to him for wanting a honeymoon with her new husband rather than an awkward family vacation with him in tow. Payne’s trinity of melancholia is completed by head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who is grieving for her son who died in the Vietnam War and dishing out both meals and home truths to her companions. Although she has a loving family and friends, she is isolated by her grief, which we see with painful clarity when Mary goes to a Christmas party.
The thread that connects Hunham, Angus and Mary is their loneliness — not only are they hiding from the rest of the world, it’s a fact that no one is going to miss them over the holidays. For different reasons, each one has been cast into the margins. In the limbo of the holiday season, in an emptied-out school, these three individuals find each other. It’s true, misery does love company.